Author: WOAmemphis17

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Sonja White

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2009

VISION
for a woman whose sensitivity to women’s needs
led her to tremendous achievements for women:

Sonja White

Love shouldn’t hurt and Sonja White’s vision is for a world where it never will.

Women struggling to escape domestic violence desperately need the safety and justice that the legal system purports to offer, so nothing makes Sonja White angrier than seeing it fail them.

Her passion has fueled her work in two aspects of domestic violence – as a victim’s advocate and as a legal aid attorney. But she has not only worked her paid job – she also gives hours of her time in various volunteer leadership roles seeking resources and policy change that will rescue women and children from the nightmare epidemic of domestic crime that infects our community.

Sonja grew up in Memphis, graduated from Hamilton High and journeyed to Adelphi University in New York for college in 1981. She did a variety of part-time jobs to get through college and law school, including selling lingerie for Bloomingdale’s. She earned her law degree from Hofstra University 1988 and worked for eight years in the New York City criminal courts.

It was during that time that she realized she could not continue to defend batterers. She could not look into the faces of the injured and traumatized women and then stand up for the men who had hurt them. She came home to Memphis and went to work as director of the Memphis YWCA Abused Women’s Services Court Advocacy Program, helping women navigate the complex system of courts.

From fall of 2001 to spring of 2004 she was an adjunct professor of law in the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law Domestic Violence Clinic. She has specialized since then in domestic violence cases as managing attorney of the Memphis Area Legal Services Family Law Unit. Her focus is on utilization of the judicial system to eliminate barriers to violence free lives for victims of domestic violence.

She goes above and beyond the parameters of her job, however, every day.

She writes grants to bring new resources to the community, such as one that created the Opportunity Plus project at Memphis Area Legal Services Family Law Unit. It offers women who have survived domestic violence case management support and assistance with employment, housing, child-rearing and other issues so that they can become independent and self-sustaining and avoid returning to their abuser.

She regularly speaks to civic and professional groups about domestic violence and court reform and has written numerous articles. She has led one plank of the domestic violence strategy for Operation: Safe Community, the coalition of business, elected and law enforcement leaders. Sonja’s initiative seeks to create a Unified Family Court here and she was named to the Shelby County Unified Family Court Task Force last year – a task that took many extra hours of work beyond her case docket.

As president of the Memphis Area Women’s Council since 2006 she leads the council’s DV action team that is pursuing new legislation, new funding and new collaborations to address the high numbers of local domestic crimes, including a record 34 domestic homicides.

As co-chair of the Memphis Shelby County Domestic Violence Council, she will oversee a revamping of its mission to grow from a networking organization to a hub of collaboration to fill gaps and strengthen capacity of essential service agencies.

Sonja White cares fervently for the hundreds of women and children who are damaged by domestic crime. She works tirelessly every day – while raising her own three children – to build a world where they and their friends and all of our children can expect to live in safe, nurturing relationships.

For her vision of a place where women can be safe from denigrating, demeaning and deadly treatment by those who are supposed to love and care for them, for her vision of a world where children can grow up in homes where adults are respectful and nurturing of each other and of them, for her vision that the judicial system can empower women to prosecute their abusers and rescue their children from harm and from generational violence, Sonja White is the 2009 Woman of Achievement for Vision.

Sonja White died in May 2013.

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Mildred Schwartz

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2005

STEADFASTNESS
for a woman with a lifetime of achievement:

Mildred Schwartz

Mildred Salomon Schwartz has led her life intentionally and actively involved in the community, business, religion, golf and most of all, her friends and family.

Her life began in tiny Newellton, Louisiana, where her family was one of six Jewish families in the town. When her father died, her mother brought her children to Memphis, opened a dry goods store and lived upstairs.

When her mother died in 1934, 14-year-old Mildred and her brother were sent to live with aunts and uncles here. She married Max Schwartz, her brother’s best friend, in 1939. When he was drafted in World War II, she took over his traveling sales business, hawking women’s dresses for Forrest City Manufacturing Co. of St. Louis. She was the only woman “salesman’’ among a staff of 30 and had the advantage of being able to wear and model the line! She drove the region, hauling bags of dresses, for three years, until Max returned.

Her list of “firsts” is significant. Mildred was elected president of Temple Israel’s board, the first woman to take that seat in 135 years. She is the role model for subsequent women presidents.

Mildred was president of the Volunteer Center, the Memphis Volunteer Placement Program, the Memphis Area Women’s Golf Association, the Plough Towers board of directors and the Memphis Section of the National Council of Jewish Women. Her skills as a trainer sent her throughout the country conducting leadership training for the National Council of Jewish Women. She chaired the Communitywide Board Training Institute and taught management and leadership at Memphis State University and Shelby State Community College.

She also became adept in fundraising and chaired the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal three times!

One of her most important and least known accomplishments came about as she served on the Tennessee Day Care Standards Committee. As an outgrowth of research done by the National Council of Jewish Women into day care conditions, she knew that conditions in many child care centers were abysmal, including many operated by churches. Mildred pressed for and won on the issue of state licensing of church-based day care centers. This regulation caused many to raise their standards of health and safety for young children.

When a car accident in 2000 resulted in five surgeries on her leg, she persisted in her president’s duties for Plough Towers, dragging her cast along with determined good spirits.

Today she continues to serve the boards of Temple Israel and Plough Towers.

A special role she takes on, with her trademark calm and light-handed teaching style, is assisting 13 year old boys and girls, as a mentor for Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations, a Jewish rite of passage.

Mildred has suffered many losses in recent years, but she has never lost her faith or her active concern for her community. Even at age 86, she left the Women of Achievement awards event, award in hand, to get back to the 25th anniversary dinner at Plough Towers which she co-chaired.

With our thanks for her steadfast love and service to family and
community, Mildred Schwartz is honored for a lifetime of achievement.

Mildred Schwartz passed away on September 26, 2019.

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Elizabeth Avery Meriwether and Lide Smith Meriwether

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether

Lide Smith Meriwether

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2005

HERITAGE
for a woman whose achievements still enrich our lives:

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether and Lide Smith Meriwether

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether and her sister-in-law Lide Meriwether were pioneering champions for voting privileges for women in Memphis, in Tennessee, and nationally. Fortunately, they both had supportive husbands—Minor L. Meriwether, an attorney and brother Niles, the Memphis city engineer. The two Meriwether families lived in a single home on Peabody Avenue while Elizabeth and Lide went forth to work for temperance and women’s rights.

Elizabeth Avery Meriwether started advocating full equality for women long before such an idea was acceptable. Before their wedding on January 1, 1850, she and Minor signed a marriage contract agreeing to share and invest equally. In 1872, when Elizabeth read that Susan B. Anthony had been arrested, tried and fined for attempting to vote in Rochester, New York, she announced that she intended to vote in Memphis at the next election. “If I am arrested for that crime, she said, “I shall be glad to share Miss Anthony’s cell.” But when Elizabeth walked into the Fifth Ward polling place, she was handed a ballot, filled it out, and dropped it in the ballot box.

Afterward, she was never certain why she was not opposed but concluded that the poll workers probably did not count her vote anyway.

That same year, she founded her own newspaper, The Tablet. Every issue promoted votes for women. She used her own money to rent The Memphis Theatre, largest in town, and on May 5, 1876, flouting all rules of “ladylike” decorum, delivered a public address on women’s rights. More than 500 women attended. Next day, the Memphis Appeal reported that “Mrs. Meriwether has proven a worthy advocate of her sex. She was interrupted frequently with bursts of applause.” Not long after that she led a delegation of women appearing before the Memphis School Board to demand that in the name of justice, women and men teachers be paid the same salaries. They were unsuccessful, but the seeds of the idea that women should have equal economic opportunities had been planted.

During the 1880s, Elizabeth Avery Meriwether’s scope became national. She traveled with Susan B. Anthony, advocating votes for women in speeches from Connecticut to Texas. After she and her family moved to St. Louis in 1883, she continued her campaigning and pleading the cause before three national presidential nominating conventions.

Meanwhile in Tennessee, her sister-in-law had assumed the leadership role in the suffrage crusade.

Originally the editor of a literary journal for genteel females, Lide Smith Meriwether had championed the “rescue of fallen women” by taking prostitutes into her home and training them for other occupations.

A vigorous advocate for the temperance cause, her efforts as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to organize Southern black women resulted in the formation of black WCTU groups in several Tennessee communities.

In 1886, the National Woman Suffrage Association employed Lide to lecture and organize groups in the state of Tennessee. She mounted an intensive campaign and in two weeks visited most sizable towns and helped organize fledgling Equal Rights clubs in Nashville, Knoxville, Jackson, Greenville, and Murfreesboro. Lide organized a Woman Suffrage League in Memphis and was elected president. Later, in the 1890s, she was elected to several terms as president of the Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association and became their “Honorary President for Life” in 1900. Lide Meriwether, representing Tennessee, joined women from 27 other states in Washington in 1892 to testify before a U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing on woman suffrage.

Though they never stopped working all of their days for women’s enfranchisement, neither Lide Smith Meriwether, who died in 1913 at the age of 84, nor Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, who was 92 when she died in 1917, lived to see their dreams fulfilled. But the great victory won by a later generation of suffragists in Nashville in 1920 was built in no small part on a strong foundation created by the ground-breaking efforts of Tennessee’s crusading Meriwether sisters-in-law.

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Pat Morgan

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2005

COURAGE
for a woman who, facing active opposition,
backed an unpopular cause in which she deeply believed:

Pat Morgan

In the Memphis area, 6,000 homeless men, women and children are fed and sheltered from local service agencies. We see them on the streets and at intersections wearing ragged dirty clothes that look as if they’ve been slept in. We fear contact with them, thinking they’ll ask us for a handout or worse yet, try to rob us. We don’t want shelters or services in our neighborhoods and organize against them to keep the homeless off “our” streets. We fail to make eye-contact, much less stop to listen to their stories. Pat Morgan, Executive Director of Partners for the Homeless, is a woman with the courage to both listen and act on their behalf.

Pat’s story starts the typical way; a Donna Reed Mom whose marriage falters transforms into the single mother of three, struggling to keep things afloat. Pat was working as a real estate broker when she volunteered to help two hours per week at the Downtown Church Association’s Food Pantry. From there she moved to the Street Ministry and the work became her passion. She listened to stories of untreated addiction, abuse and mental illness and realized that what is needed is a “continuum of care.”  She attended more meetings and became more active. When a friend told her that for someone so smart she was ignorant, she went back to school. She graduated from Rhodes College in 1991, at age 51.

Long active in the Democratic party, she believed that the solutions to homelessness are political. After graduation she interned in Al Gore’s office then survived on a variety of temp jobs. When Clinton announced for president, she quit her job to join the campaign. “Pat’s Excellent Adventure” included time on the bus in New Hampshire and tromping through snow with much younger campaign workers. She became co-director of the Washington Operations Office.

After the election she was appointed Program Analyst at the U.S. Interagency Council on the Homeless. Working closely with Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Special Needs Programs, Pat brought her experiences in front-line service delivery to the table. She spent 6 ½ years working with the White House Domestic Policy Council.

In 1999, Pat returned to Memphis to be closer to her family. She became Executive Director for Partners for the Homeless, a public-private partnership begun in 1995. The group’s mission is to coordinate, develop and implement solutions for homelessness in Memphis and Shelby County. She is now working with representatives from 55 organizations to create a holistic intervention program targeting 20,000 at-risk households. She has secured $5 million from HUD for local Continuum of Care applications. She serves on the state council for creating a plan to end homelessness in Tennessee.

Though she now works primarily in program development, policy and service delivery, Pat has not forgotten the people she met through Calvary’s Street Ministry. She still goes out at 12:30 am looking for people sleeping on the street. She knows their names and histories. She asks questions and really listens to their stories. “I’ve only been mugged twice,” she says, “and not by the homeless.”

It takes courage to walk into the broken lives of these men, women and children and work for holistic solution. Pat Morgan has the passion and the courage to do just that.

Pat Morgan retired in 2011 and published a memoir in 2014 titled The Concrete Killing Fields: One Woman’s Battle to Break the Cycle of Homelessness.

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Rosalyn Nichols

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2005

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Rev. Rosalyn Nichols

In March 1998, Rev. Rosalyn Nichols attended the third funeral of a
childhood friend, killed by what she calls “relational violence.” She delivered the eulogy, and then asked herself “What can I do to prevent this from happening again?”

Her answer was action — first through Sisters4Life, a small group of women who united after loss of their friend Rosmari Pleasure, shot to death by an ex-boyfriend.

In the years since organizing the first Rosmari Pleasure Memorial 5K Walk/Run, Rosalyn has made domestic violence her singular cause within her service as a pastor.

She organized and leads A More Excellent Way, Inc., a non-profit organization focused on ending domestic violence. Local crime statistics confirm the need – more than 11 percent of homicide cases last year were domestically related. Domestic violence counselors estimate only 1 in 10 cases of assault is ever reported.

“At the heart of it, we have to change the way some people think about how to live in love,” Rosalyn, 41, says. “This ‘break up to make up, that’s all we do’ mentality has to go. We have to change attitudes before we can change behavior.”

Rosalyn attended Booker T. Washington High School and LeMoyne-Owen College where she graduated cum laude with a major in biology. She earned her Master of Divinity summa cum laude in 1996 from Memphis Theological Seminary. After a turn as visiting professor at a seminary in Zimbabwe, Rosalyn joined Metropolitan Baptist Church as associate pastor.

She served there for five years before turning her attention full time to A More Excellent Way. Her mission is to promote and encourage loving, healthy relationships in the home, school, workplace, neighborhood and places of worship toward the elimination of violence.

She says, “We want to teach men and women what healthy relationships look like, to make good, stable marriages a functional, acceptable cultural norm.”

The original 5K race has grown into a full weekend called Love4Life dedicated to domestic violence awareness. On the second weekend in November, it includes the 5K run, a conference, a memorial service for families of slain victims and a Sunday “prayer and praise’’ service. Another program of AWay Inc. is called the Circle of Courage which provides training and resources on domestic violence for churches and other faith-based communities. And Love Talks is a study program being developed for high school and college students with a pilot program in place at Booker T. Washington High School.

In 2001, Rosalyn founded at her dining room table with eight other people a ministry that became Freedom’s Chapel Christian Church. In May 2004, she earned her Doctor of Ministry degree from Virginia Union University in Richmond and moved her church into its first worship center. Freedom’s Chapel has grown to about 50 members and has celebrated 15 baptisms of adults and children. “The church and AWay Inc. share the space,” Rosalyn says. “Both are very interested in relationship building and both are faithful to a vision.”

Rosalyn Nichols turned her grief and dismay into action and is determined each day to teach Memphis to love without hitting, without hurting, without violence.

For that work, despite inertia, apathy and ignorance around her, Rosalyn Nichols is the 2005 Woman of Achievement for Determination.

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Kathy Kastan

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2005

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Kathy Kastan

At 40, Kathy Kastan was happy, healthy and fit, as far as anyone could tell.

The physician’s wife and mother of three sons in Cordova was avid about exercise — running, biking, swimming and weight lifting. She had no family history or health factors that connected to heart disease.

But something was wrong. Shortness of breath and shoulder pain she attributed to the stress of the move to Memphis and her mother’s death. But then on a bike trip with friends, she became nauseous and pain flowed down her shoulder and arm. The first cardiologist diagnosed mitral valve prolapse and prescribed antibiotics, but exercise continued to cause shoulder pain and going up and down steps was difficult.

On a hiking vacation in Colorado she collapsed with classic chest pain that radiated from her jaw to her back. A second cardiologist ran tests but could not find the problem . “Go exercise,’’ he said. Four days later she collapsed again. Treatments either failed or caused other complications so that eight months later, at age 42, Kathy had double bypass surgery. Her third cardiologist provided proper medication.

“I had gone from a woman with symptoms after exercise to popping nitroglycerin like candy,’’ Kathy said. “Now I have a normal, busy life. I exercise four to five days a week.’’

Her search for good care for herself led her to WomenHeart, the
15,000-member national coalition for women with heart disease, and to
leadership in the cause of women and heart health. Based in Washington, DC, WomenHeart is the only advocacy group for women with heart disease. “WomenHeart got me someplace. They virtually got my life back,” she says. She now serves as president.

In February 2005, Kathy stepped into an international spotlight in a full-color advertising campaign that shows her, in an open white blouse, revealing the sternum-length scar she calls her badge of courage.’’

Kathy has become an indefatigable advocate for women’s health. She has met with President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush, speaks at community and political forums and encourages medical students and doctors to care for women differently.

Kathy grew up, daughter of a physician, in the San Francisco Bay area. She earned her bachelor’s and two graduate degrees at Washington University in St. Louis and was a practicing psychotherapist for 14 years.

Six years ago, she and her husband Michael moved from Baltimore to Memphis where Michael is director of the St. Jude Cancer Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Now her photograph and her story are in The Wall Street Journal, Smart Money and women’s magazines across the nation. “This shouldn’t have happened to her,’’ the ad says.” Ignorance almost killed her.’’

She is excited about calls she’s had from local women who saw a news story about the scar photograph. She hopes they can be organized into a local support group for women with heart disease.

“It’s the number one killer,’’ Kathy says. “And it can happen to you.”

Kathy’s heroic efforts will go far towards saving women’s lives by building awareness of this unseen killer.

In February of 2010, Kathy Kastan was awarded the Woman’s Day Red Dress Award for her dedication and tireless devotion to women and the heart disease movement. Kathy Kastan, LCSW/Ma Ed., has been Director of Duke Medicine’s Women’s Health & Advocacy Initiative since October of 2011. She is Past President, Emeritus of the Board of Directors of WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease. Ms. Kastan is the Past Chairman of the Board of Directors and board member for the Greater Southeast Affiliate of the American Heart Association. She is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Triangle’s American Heart Association. Kastan authored From the Heart: A Woman’ Guide to Living Well with Heart Disease. She is also a frequent blogger on the Huffington Post.

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Rebekah Jordan

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2007

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Rebekah Jordan

In a community where city employees routinely worked two or three jobs to provide for their families, the idea of a living wage was a hard sell, to say the least.

Lucky for Memphis, the young woman who took on the job of selling it had the tenacity, fortitude and intelligence to sell, sell and sell again.

Rev. Rebekah Jordan, daughter of a Memphis minister and a Memphis school teacher, set out to train in college to teach, but found her way to an internship in social change — and the rest is now very important Memphis history.

Rebekah saw the powerful connection between ministry and social change. She went to seminary and sowed the seeds of what became the Mid-South Interfaith Network for Economic Justice as she prepared for ordination. Working with union leader Fred Ashwill and Rev. Steve Shapard, they laid ground work to form a faith community focused on work related issues.

Beginning in November 2002, coalition members researched what a living wage in Memphis is and shaped the campaign and ordinance. In summer 2003, they began to meet with City Council members.

Through numerous setbacks, political shenanigans and even disputes among the campaign’s community supporters, Rebekah persevered. She drew and redrew strategy, rallying volunteers to go door to door with petitions, to come to rallies in bitter cold, to call council members and press them to appear at hearings and to vote for the living wage.

She was informed, insistent, unflagging, respectful, respected.

And successful.

The final aspects of a living wage ordinance passed in Memphis in November 2006 extending guarantee of $10 an hour with benefits or $12 an hour without to all full and part time city employees, employees of most city contractors and companies that are granted property tax exemptions.

In celebrations of the victory, Rebekah graciously credited the coalition of faith, labor and community groups and those individuals who steadfastly answered the call to rally or contact council members or otherwise answer.
But all who participated in the campaign know that the reason Memphis now has a living wage is because Rev. Rebekah Jordan was determined that Memphis workers have a living wage.

Rev. Andre Johnson of Gifts of Life Ministries captured Rebekah’s impact in these words at a worship celebration: “When all hope seemed lost, she continued to fire us up with her emails and phone calls, telling us where we needed to be and what we needed to do when we get there! …and with her leadership, we have assembled a nice diverse group of people from all over Memphis who have shown us support. From Christians to Jews and Muslims; from black and brown; from white and all around; from Germantown to Downtown; from Boxtown and Uptown; from rich and poor; from inner city and suburb, from gay and straight, from PhD to no D, from CEO’s to mopping floors.”

Rebekah Jordan is determined that low-wage workers be treated with respect and justice. Even as she leads the push to bring the living wage to county government employees, she is now also organizing a Memphis Workers Center where immigrant workers could learn about their workplace rights and organize to improve working conditions.

This 2007 Woman of Achievement has just gotten started!

 

Reverend Rebekah Jordan (Gienapp) is the writer of a blog called The Barefoot Mommy which gives parents advice on how to raise children free of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her blog has been featured in The Washington Post, The Lisa Show, and Brownicity.

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Karla O. Davis

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2013

INITIATIVE
for a woman who seized the
opportunity to use her talents and created her own future:

Karla O. Davis

Karla’s initiative has taken her down a path that leads from Chicago to Memphis and from Memphis to Nashville, from the Environmental Protection Agency to Memphis Hope, and from there to the Tennessee Commission for Labor and Work Force Development. Each move has resulted in improved lives for people touched by her work.

Born and raised by a loving family (her parents have been married for 58 years!), Karla lived in Chicago until leaving for Atlanta to attend Spelman College. Knowing that she wanted to become an engineer, she returned home to continue her studies. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in bio-engineering from the University of Illinois, Chicago.

She went to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. Over the course of 16 years, she assumed a number of management level positions and earned numerous awards for service along the way. While working in Chicago, she met her future husband, Terry Davis, through salsa dancing. In 2006, after enduring years of brutal winters, the couple decided to move to his home town of Memphis. Lucky for us!

Using her excellent networking skills, Karla took the initiative to meet Ruby Bright, director of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis. Impressed by Ms. Bright, Karla offered to volunteer for the foundation. This connection led to a position as director of Urban Strategies for Memphis HOPE. She committed herself to creating opportunities for families of the former Dixie Homes and Lamar Terrace communities. This was a huge challenge as most families were headed by single mothers whose situations had been deemed hopeless by others.

Karla was responsible for establishing cooperative relationships with other organizations, identifying funding opportunities and leveraging resources to help move these families out of poverty. She says Memphis HOPE’s goal was to “serve the whole family, by connecting adult residents with employment preparation and job training programs, connecting youth with tutoring and enrichment programs, and connecting seniors and the disabled with service programs.” Karla accomplished this by supporting a range of intervention strategies designed to permanently lift these families out of poverty and into self-sufficiency. Over 400 families benefited.

In 2011, Tennessee Governor-elect Bill Halsam offered her the job of Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. She says, “I was shocked and incredibly excited and honored. This was bigger than I could have ever dreamed.” She accepted. She was one of six women to be appointed to his 24-member cabinet. She now commutes between Memphis and Nashville. Karla manages a staff of nearly 2000, with offices all over the state, and administers a $220 million annual budget. She has embraced the massive task of bringing an industrial and agricultural based workforce into the world of technology and advanced manufacturing.

People who use the services of her department are often in crisis. They may be unemployed, have lost their jobs unexpectedly, need job training. In our current economic climate, they often feel desperate. It is her goal to provide them with excellent customer service so that they know that they are respected and that their voices are heard.

She says: “My entire career has revolved around public administration of some sort. I wish I could say I always wanted to be a public servant, but really it found me. Memphis has been a place of tremendous opportunity for me. I count moving here as one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Karla Davis uses her initiative with compassion and kindness to improve the lives of those she serves.

For this, we salute her.

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Felica Richard

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2013

DETERMINATION
for a woman who solved a glaring problem despite
widespread inertia, apathy or ignorance around her:

Felica Richard

Felica Richard knows what it is to be misused and abused. She knows about being hurt – with verbal and emotional abuse, molestation and rape – and not telling anyone. She knows how important it is to have access to the right help when you ask for it.

Her own experience has made Felica Richard determined to help survivors of violence feel strong and feel good about themselves. She has created an organization, recruits fellow cosmetologists and works beyond her paid job as a victim navigator at the Family Safety Center to offer extra support for those in need.

Felica has lived in Memphis all her life. She grew up on the city’s north side, third of five children in a family where her parents were not married but her dad lived a few blocks away.

Her school friends at Craigmont Middle and High School often sought her out for advice. Even at that early age, Felica found herself drawn to the wounded and rejected.

She understands now that it was the molestation by a family member and the rape during a date as a young teenager that caused her not to love herself. This under laid her drinking and promiscuity as a young adult, her bounce between multiple colleges and stack of college loan debt. She married – but won a divorce within six months to escape verbal and emotional abuse.

Eventually Felica entered and completed cosmetology school and began to work full-time as a hairdresser while also beginning a social work degree. After coursework at Southwest Tennessee, Middle Tennessee and University of Memphis, Felica earned her bachelor’s degree in social work in 2009. She interned at the Shelby County Crime Victim Center and continued to “do hair” part-time.

By then Felica had been a mom for six years, having adopted at birth a baby girl born to a family member.

Since she graduated from high school in 1989, Felica has had a dream of building a safe haven for hurt women and their children. Felica calls the organization she founded in 1999 Women Loving Themselves First believing “If I can get the mother together, she can take care of children. I’m looking to help her build her self esteem, give her hope, love herself and then she can give love. You can’t give what you don’t have.”

She began her outreach simply with a routine of communicating encouraging emails and prayer requests. In 2009, she began offering direct services to women referred to her by other agencies. She provides help with their immediate needs, especially temporary emergency housing, often by reserving motel rooms in her name – to protect the fleeing woman. “I pay a night and they pay a night,” Felica says. She rents a U-Haul for those who need it and puts their belongings in storage. Sometimes she styles their hair for free.

Now a full-time navigator for domestic violence victims at the Family Safety Center, Felica still recruits colleagues in local salons to give violence survivors professional makeovers to prepare them for court or a job interview. She is offering training on the dynamics of domestic violence to local professional stylists.

Her goal is to raise funds for a gated community where survivors of abusive, violent relationships could live during their healing, both single women and mothers, with programs for children, comprehensive case management and constant security.

“I’m a server. . . I went into social work because that’s where God needs me and I can help women. . . I compare myself to David and domestic violence is Goliath. I believe that giant can come down – I really do.”

With her passion for helping and her determination to be of service, Felica Richard will be here to help women damaged by violence for many years to come.

 

Felica Richard now works with the Shelby County Crime Victims and Rape Crisis Center as Community Engagement Supervisor.

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Constance McMillen

WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
2011

HEROISM
for a woman whose heroic spirit was tested and
shown as a model to all in Shelby County and beyond:

Constance McMillen

Constance McMillen was just a girl who wanted to have fun, like any other high school senior looking forward to senior prom in the spring of 2010. But when she was told by her vice principal, principal, superintendent and school board attorney she would not be allowed to attend her prom – because she wanted to bring her girlfriend – everything changed.

Constance McMillen reported her school to the American Civil Liberties Union which informed the Itawamba County school district that the rule was illegal. Change it by March 10, said the ACLU, or we’ll sue. The school’s systems response was to cancel the prom on March 10 and issue a press release that generated national and international news attention. Constance’s life hasn’t been the same since and that’s putting it mildly. “They cancelled prom and I was on CNN the next day!” she says.

The ACLU immediately filed suit. Constance received text and Facebook messages saying she had ruined prom for everyone and that she didn’t deserve to go to that school. Her best friend, who had been like a sister to her, stopped talking to her on March 10 and they have not spoken since.

In court a few days before the April 2 prom date, school officials testified there would be a prom privately hosted by parents and that Constance and her girlfriend could go. But when she went to get a ticket, she found it had also been cancelled. Eventually it seems that officials and parents decided to have two proms — most students attended one held in another community and Constance was able to get tickets to one where only six students showed up.

Constance let her lawyers know. She had originally filed for only a dollar in damages but after the fake prom, the publicity – and the duplicity – she was harassed and had to move in with a family in Jackson, Mississippi, five hours away, to finish high school.

A federal judge ruled that Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, MS, violated Constance’s First Amendment rights. She filed for damages and settled out of court for $35,000 with a promise from the school system to change their sexual orientation and gender identity policy.

“It wasn’t about the money,” Constance says, “as long as they changed their anti-discrimination policies. Still, they were trying not to change it, but we got onto ‘em and told ‘em if they didn’t, we would file for contempt of court, so eventually they changed it.”

Constance, who lives with her paternal grandmother in Fulton, got connected to the ACLU and gay activists through her mother, a lesbian who lives near Biloxi. “She just tries to live and do what she’s got to do, but she didn’t think it was right,” Constance said.

Constance is majoring in psychology at Northeast Mississippi Community College.

Invitations to speak on panels and at rallies come from all over. Constance has been interviewed by Ellen DeGeneres who also gave her a $30,000 college scholarship. She has been honored as a Woman of the Year for 2010 by Glamour magazine. She has led gay pride parades in New York City and California, has met President Obama at a White House reception and lobbied Congress.

People are asking her to tell her story and why she chose to be out front
The ACLU reported fewer calls this year from students needing support around prom season – and that several kids called to say that their school officials had heard of “that girl in Mississippi” – and so they said, ”sure, you can take your girlfriend.”

What’s the best thing to come from all this? “That it changed things for people,” Constance says, “first at my school and then over the country. It was already illegal, really, but since this was in federal court, now it’s in black and white that no school can do what they did to me. It is illegal to stop someone from going to prom based on their sexual orientation.”

Constance took an enormously heroic step for a young woman who was raised hearing that gay people can’t go to heaven. She has become a spokesperson for gay rights and hopes her studies lead to a career as a psychoanalyst so she can scientifically study the hostile effects on overall health on individuals forced into the closet.

Constance McMillen is our 2011 Woman of Achievement for Heroism.